


Truth In Cinema

by roebling



Category: Actor RPF, Drake & Josh RPF
Genre: M/M, One Shot, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-17
Updated: 2008-07-17
Packaged: 2017-10-23 02:59:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roebling/pseuds/roebling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drake does not know how to know what he wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truth In Cinema

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally published July 17, 2008.)

He's sour at first -

_Who is this loser and why am I stuck with him?_

At thirteen it's worse than social suicide to suddenly be buddied up with a fat momma's boy. Drake sulks in the break room, white paper tucked into his collar to keep the orange pancake makeup at bay. It scratches. At first he thought that wearing makeup was a sissy thing to do, but it's no big deal now. He overheard his mother on the phone say that he's becoming cosmopolitan.

The fat kid comes swishing up in track pants. His hair is short. His skin is pale. He holds out his hand.

"Hi," he says. "I'm Josh."

"Yeah," Drake says. He knows.

Josh grins. "You ever hear the one about the blonde and the gynecologist?"

Drake shakes his head.

"So there's this blonde," Josh says. He rubs his hand on his leg. It's always hot in the studio. "She's at her gynecologist, and after the doc's done examining her, he says, 'Congratulations! You're pregnant!' So she asks him, 'Is it mine?'"

Nobody laughs. That's not true - Andrew and Nicole both laugh loudly. A few of the adults smother chuckles behind closed hands. Josh is still grinning. Drake does not laugh. He doesn't think it's funny.

The producers tell them they have chemistry, whatever that means. Their skits are always the funniest and it's easier, somehow, with Josh, than it is with the other kids. They're like the great double acts of old -- that's another line the producers use, but when they say Laurel and Hardy, Drake just thinks of bowler hats.

Sitting in the cafeteria, he says to Samantha (dark hair, green eyes, lips slimy/sparkly with gloss -- she's only guested on the show once before), "Yeah, I'm going to get my own show."

"Wow," she says.

Drake isn't trying to impress her, really. He doesn't know what he's doing with her, but he knows he likes talking to girls -- or some girls anyway. He likes how they are small and smell nice and pay close attention to the things he says. He knows he is supposed to like those things.

"Yeah," he says. "I'm going to write the theme song."

"Wow," she says, again. She twists her plastic bracelet.

Josh sits down across the table with a plate of macaroni and cheese. "Hi guys," he says.

"Drake was telling me that you guys are getting a show," Samantha says.

"Oh yeah," Josh says, perking up. "It's going to be awesome."

Josh talks a lot when he gets nervous. Josh talks a lot most of the time. He gestures excitedly with his hands while he explains the show to Samantha. She pays just as much attention to him as she paid to Drake. Drake fidgets. He wants to tell Samantha that he will play a song on his guitar for her, if she wants, but Josh keeps talking and before he has the chance she is taken away by a handler to go to wardrobe.

But really, it's okay. The show is anyway. Drake thought it would be a bummer to be on a show for little kids at age fifteen, but it's kind of fun being a heartthrob for the pre-teen set. Whenever he's out, parents and their beaming six year olds stop and ask him for his autograph. Everyone gets along well. Drake really likes Miranda, and Josh is pretty okay too. Everyone likes him: he's funny and he tells stories Drake isn't sure he believes about growing up in New York City.

Josh doesn't make demands, either. He's never pushy or bossy. The only thing he asks for on set is a pool table, which Drake thinks is pretty cool. Josh plays a lot with the crew. He's surprisingly good and they're always amused when he beats them, at least the first time.

"Where'd you learn to play?" Drake asks him.

Josh is leaning over the table. He's taller than Drake is now. His reach is better. He examines the billiard balls, workmanlike. Josh often seems younger than he is, but not when playing pool. He makes his shot; two balls roll across green felt and drop into the pockets.

"There was a bar on the corner of my block," he explains. "In second grade I was friends with this kid Fernando, the owner's son, so I'd go there after school and we'd play. I was so short I had to stand on a chair to see the table."

"You're pretty good," Drakes says.

"Thanks," says Josh. "I wanted to be a professional for a while, before I broke into show biz."

"Like a hustler?" Drake asks, smirking.

Josh laughs. "No, man. There are leagues and stuff. Like bowling, only marginally less lame."

He lines up another shot. The cue slides through his fingers, and two more balls sink in.

"If you want to play, I'll re-rack," he says.

"Uh," Drake says. "I don’t know how."

"It's never too late to learn," Josh says.

He's full of such little truisms. He gets them from his mother, who wears power suits with padded shoulders and participates in career weekends at the convention center.

Drake shrugs.

"Come here," Josh says. He hands Drake the cue.

"Square up to the table," Josh instructs. "First you need to make a bridge. Make a fist and put your knuckles on the table. Now make a ring out of your thumb and index finger."

Drake does.

"No," Josh says. "Not like that."

Josh's hands are warm and big -- Drake's mother is often wondering when he's going to grow into them. He places his hands over Drake's and nudges his fingers a little. It's not that weird to have Josh standing behind him, leaning over his shoulder. They have to hug and stuff all the time on the show.

"There," Josh says, satisfied. "Now take the cue and line it up. Draw it back, and when you hit the cue ball, that's called a stroke."

Drake keeps his hand steady. The cue hits the white ball off center. Instead of running straight into the waiting blue two, it streaks off to the side, sending a bunch of balls scattering. None go down the holes.

"Shit," says Drake. "That was bad."

"Not that bad," Josh says. "Keep playing. You'll get better."

He does. They play pool pretty often after that, for the rest of that season's filming. Drake never wins a game, but he's not embarrassing himself any more. It's weird when cut is called on that last day to think he's not going to see Josh -- not going to see any of them -- for six months. His mother tells him she's so glad to have a chance to go back to the real world for a while, but to Drake it seems like someone is pushing the pause button.

During those six months at home, Drake meets a girl named Elizabeth and asks her to be his girlfriend. She giggles and says yes. Drake thinks she must be flattered to be dating someone who is on television. He's not sure of that, but he thinks. They go to the movies twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Afterwards, sitting on a park bench, they kiss, and Elizabeth lets Drake put his hand on her breast, just barely a handful underneath her padded trainer bra. It's probably normal for boys his age, but he feels like he spends at least half of his time jerking off.

When he has to go back to LA for filming, he tells Elizabeth he's very sorry and he'll love her forever and call her once a week. He thinks she knows he has no intention of doing so.

It's good to be back on the set. Everything is the same as it was, except Josh is taller yet and not as fat and his hair is longer. Miranda isn't a little kid any more. Maybe nothing is the same except for Drake. He doesn't think he's changed at all. He still wants mostly just to play his guitar and write good songs and maybe find a girl that wants to listen to him noodle around. Teenagers are supposed to seethe inside, but Drake feels like he's simmering at best.

Josh works out now. Drake doesn't know why really because Josh is strong; he's always been strong enough to pick up Drake, anyway. But in the afternoon Josh puts on an old tee shirt and sweat pants and he disappears for a while. When Drake asks him where he goes he says, "You know, to the gym ..."

Drake stares blankly.

"I'm trying to be healthier," Josh says.

Drake doesn't know if that's it, because he catches Josh smoking out in the back lot sometimes, crouching beside the door, careful to exhale downwind so he doesn't reek when he goes inside. Anyway, Drake goes and sits with Josh sometimes when he's lifting weights. Josh can bench press two hundred and thirty pounds, which is a lot more than Drake weighs. It might be more than Josh weighs, these days at least. Drake doesn't know. He doesn't ask.

He asks other things though. He asks Josh if he has a girlfriend.

"What do you think?" he mutters through gritted teeth. It's warm and sweat runs down Josh's nose.

"I hooked up with this girl while we were on break," Drake says. "She was hot."

"Yeah," Josh says.

"I got to second base with her, man,” Drake says. “It was awesome."

"Great," says Josh.

Drake flips open his cell phone to see if he has any messages. He doesn't.

"It sucks that there are no girls around here," he says. "I can't wait until I get my license."

"Yeah," Josh says.

Drake rolls his eyes. "Dude," he says. "Don't be gay."

Josh doesn't say anything, but he lifts the barbell again. He is breathing hard.

"It would be okay though," Drake says quickly. "It would be okay if you were. There's nothing wrong with that."

Drake has never really known any gay people, just Justin, one of the hair stylists, and Susanne and Ellen, friends of his mom’s who live together. He is pretty sure it's okay to be gay though. He's pretty sure there's nothing wrong with it. It's not something he's thought about, that much.

When Josh sets the weight down on the stand, it clinks. He sits up and lifts his shirt to wipe his face. Drake can see his soft stomach.

"I know there's nothing wrong with it," Josh says. He stands. He's a lot taller than Drake is these days. "But no, dude. I'm not gay."

"Oh," Drake says.

"Yeah," Josh says. "I'm gonna go shower. I'll catch you later."

He grabs his water bottle and his towel and leaves.

Drake wonders if he's being weird, asking Josh the kind of things he asks him. But, he doesn't really know how guys are supposed to behave around their friends. He rarely sees the ones at home, and here there's only Josh. Probably he would say that Josh is his best friend, after all this time, whatever that is supposed to mean. Rules aren't the same for best friends. It's something different. Drake doesn't know what.

He hopes it's different, because he thinks about Josh a lot more than he thinks about his friends from home. Well, it's not surprising -- they're kind of bound together by the show. But still. When Josh is in that movie and gets to go to Sundance, Drake is not jealous. Acting is great, but Drake's heart lies with his music. Drake is not jealous at all. He reads all the reviews, and feels something whenever they are complimentary towards Josh. It isn't quite pride, but it's close. He thinks it's close. He clips some of the nicest reviews and keeps tucked into an envelop in his desk.

When Drake wakes up in the hospital after the accident, Josh is the third person he sees. His mom won't leave his side, but his dad goes to get Josh from the waiting room.

"He's been here all night," his dad says. "I sent him out to get some sleep."

Josh looks bad; he's pale and his eyes are red.

"You're okay?" Josh asks.

"I think so," Drakes says.

"Dude," Josh says. "Don't do that again."

Drake laughs, weakly. His body aches. "I wasn't planning on it."

It seems like a long, long time before Drake is well again. His face is fucked up and a perverse part of him wants to leave the scars, but his face is his livelihood, or however that expression goes. Josh would know. Anyway, he has the surgery, but he still feels like he's changed, somehow. His cheeks are hollow; he's lost too much weight. He grows a beard but has to shave when it's time to go back to the show.

They throw him a party the first day of filming. Everyone is there. There's a cake in the shape of the car he crashed. It's a little morbid. Drake doesn't know whose idea that was. Josh hugs him wordlessly and ruffles his hair. He is thin now, and looks older. He looks like an adult. He has a girlfriend who Drake never meets. He does read the cutesy text messages she sends Josh sometimes. From those text messages, Drake imagines her as very thin, very blonde, very perky. Not like Josh at all. Nothing like he'd expect.

That season they shoot a scene where they kiss. They only do two takes, and the first one is a joke. Josh kisses him sloppily, trying to get him to break character. The second take is fine. The kiss is supposed to be funny, and it is. Still, Drake feels like someone dropped a pebble in the well of his soul. He doesn't talk to anyone that night. He goes home and showers and sits outside with his guitar, lighting cigarettes and letting them burn to the filter in the ashtray.

It would be a lie, okay, to say he's never thought about kissing a guy. It would be a lie to say he's never kissed a guy. It's just. He's not like Drake-on-the-show, not an asshole idiot, but he knows somehow that liking girls is what's expected of him. And he does like them. But sometimes he likes guys too. He goes to a concert by himself one night, the kind of concert where no one will recognize him and he makes out with a tall boy in a corner. It's good. Drake likes it. Afterwards, he thinks of that boy often.

And he thinks of other boys too. Athletes, sometimes. He likes men with stubble and broad shoulders. Nobody thinks it's the least bit strange for him to have posters of baseball players hanging in his room. Sometimes he thinks of boys he knows from award shows and other lame industry events. He tries not to. He tries not to but he does not know how to keep his mind from thinking the things it thinks. Even when he can force himself to focus on something else, those thoughts are still there: not gone but just shrouded by the more mundane.

The show ends. He's not sad really. There's probably going to be a movie sometime soon, before they get too old. Drake is nineteen and Josh is eighteen and it's getting hard to pass them off as high school juniors. Anyway, Josh has three movies lined up and Drake is going into the studio to work on a new album. It's not like anything is ending. It's more like other things are beginning. They're going to keep in touch. They promise.

They do at first. Josh sends emails late at night, rambling missives about the books he's reading and the pool he plays with his buddies. Drake tries to call once a week. It's weird talking on the phone. Sometimes they can barely get a word out without laughing. Sometimes they have nothing to say. When Josh goes to Vancouver to film, the emails become less frequent. When Drake calls they talk for ten minutes at most before someone interrupts and Josh has to go.

It's almost a year before they see each other. Backstage at the Kid's Choice Awards, Drake is talking to some unscrupulous suits. They want to take his tour to county fairs. If he had better options, he would tell them to go screw.

It's not that things aren't going well. They're just not going as well as Drake thought they would. Everything else has been so easy; he didn't think that this would be hard. Drake isn't used to challenges. He does not believe that working for something makes you savor it more or makes you a better person or anything like that.

Josh is standing in front of the mirror in the dressing room when Drake storms in, blinking as eye drops dribble down his cheeks.

"Dude," he says. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," Drake says. He is always tense after talking to the men from the label.

"Nice,” says Josh. He blinks a few times and smiles. He's wearing something foolish. Drake realizes that for the first time they are here not together, not as the two halves of a lauded whole. Josh is very still. His eyes are red, despite the Visine.

"Are you high?" Drake asks.

Josh giggles. "No man," he says. "I'm fine."

That's no answer to Drake's question.

They do not talk the rest of the night.

Josh's movie -- the one he starred in, the film with buzz -- comes out in theaters and he does a lot of press. In the pictures in the magazines Josh is tan and happy, his arm curled around a girl with dark hair named Olivia (another up and comer) and Mary-Kate Olsen, of all people. Drake goes to see the film in a theater dressed in a hoodie and glasses. Nobody recognizes him. Nobody would, anyway -- this is not a movie for young children and their prim parents.

There is something about the strange familiar person on the screen that makes his stomach ache. It's just a movie -- but still, when did their paths diverge? Drake doesn't remember anything changing. He doesn't feel any different, and yet here is Josh as someone who he does not recognize.

When Josh leans over to kiss the girl, and misses, and presses his lips awkwardly against her face, Drake's heart aches for him. It's fiction -- he knows it's fiction, but he doesn't know if that has ever mattered.

When Josh is naked on screen, under the shower, washed in bright summer light, Drake looks away and yet cannot. These are profane sights: the wide gold of his shoulders, and his mouth on the girl's mouth, and her delicate hands around his neck, and the cord necklace sitting across his collarbones. They are young and they are close and it is beautiful. Real life is not so gracious; Drake knows. It's never been so for him.

Alone that night in the decently large stall shower of a shabby hotel room, Drake closes his eyes and tries to recall every single time Josh has ever touched him. It's too hard though -- there are an entire lifetime of memories to sift through, and they never seemed so precious before, never seemed like anything he ought to catalog and hoard, not like they do now. Josh at fifteen is vague, shadowy, forgotten. He thinks instead of what he saw in that film and with one hand around his dick and two fingers pressed just into the tight warm of his ass he comes weakly all over his lower stomach.

Two weeks later, they're filming together.

On the same old set, with the same old people, it's like nothing has changed, except everything has, or at least one thing. They're still Drake & Josh, right, but now after filming is done for the day Drake goes back to his apartment and turns on the air conditioning and closes the blinds and sits in the dark on his couch and masturbates. He does that before he does anything else. But it's not fair because Josh is still a dope and lame when he talks to anyone female over the age of seventeen. Probably Drake should do something. Probably he can't go on. Most likely he will.

On location they have nothing to do while Miranda and Nancy shoot a scene. Josh is wearing a Santa costume, bulky fake-looking padding underneath. He makes some lame joke about that, something self-effacing, and Drake has to close his eyes as a wave of heat presses against the boundaries of his skull. Now the padding is off and his jacket is undone while they wait.

"Hey," Josh says. He nudges Drake and mimes taking a hit on a joint. "Come on."

There's an empty wardrobe closet. They sit between racks of clothing swathed in filmy plastic. Josh rolls a neat, thick joint and produces a lighter. He exhales through his nose. Drake takes the joint from him and inhales: the smoke is hot and harsh, like ash against the back of his throat. He coughs. Josh laughs.

"Careful," he says.

"They're going to smell it on us," Drake says. He moves his leg; it was pressed against Josh's.

Josh rolls his eyes and wipes his hand on his undershirt. "They have no idea," he says. "And also they don't care."

The cherry of the joint flares as he breathes in. His lips are pursed. His irises are transparent glass haloed by a ring of black. His pupils are large.

This is not what it should be, but this is what it is. Drake cannot help himself.

He leans forward and presses a kiss against Josh's lower lip. He can feel the faint grit of stubble against his nose.

Josh does not move.

Drake moves further forward. His knees press against Josh's knees. He braces one hand on Josh's thigh and curls the other in his own lap.

Josh does not move. His is so still. Drake kisses him until his lips are wet and red. Then he sits back on his heels.

Josh blinks slowly as a cat. "What was that?" he asks.

Drake kisses him again because there are no words that would suffice.

This time Josh pushes him gently aside.

"No," he says. "No, Drake. Come on, dude. Think what you're doing."

He doesn't look angry, but ...

He takes another drag on the joint, passes it to Drake. It's down to just a nub, so short that Drake's fingertips burn.

Yeah, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Drake inhales and coughs and fragile small things inside of him shake free and sink down. And he lowers his eyes and concentrates only on that burn in his fingers because Josh is there and he is the same and he is not the same and Drake wants him -- wants something anyway, something secret that Josh has discovered. Josh's knee is pressed into Drake's thigh but they are miles apart. But it’s not supposed to be like this. Drake's sure of it. He saw it somewhere: on screen, in a film, in a dream.


End file.
